Meet "Nursebot"

There is a crisis in health care and health care delivery, it does not really matter were you live in the world, in every country on every continent there is some form of health care / delivery crisis. On continental Africa we call it “brain drain”, an exodus of nurses and doctors to developed countries were there are shortages of medical staff and where the pay and working conditions are better than it is back home. That is not to say African countries did not have it own shortages to begin with, I remember being sick as a seven year old in Ghana, going to a hospital where I waited for over two hours along with other only to be told there was no doctor available that day. The head nurse on duty stepped up becoming the doctor for the day I remember being upset and questioning her diagnoses when set handed over her prescribed injections for me she might have been right since I lived.


We possibly live in the best of medical times there are new medicines coming out each day, to help us live longer we have chronic diseases because science has figured out how to keep us alive in spite of what ills us. As a person who is living with chronic disease I am grateful for the advancement both in medications and health technology, I am also very worried about the present state of health care and delivery. It is great that we have all the medication and technology but what is its use if we do not have enough health care professionals to help us take advantage of all the advancements. What use for example is having the latest state of the art imaging technology when there is so few qualified technician to operate the machine, which leaves a patient on a wait list.

A friend sent me a picture of the robot above with a line that said -->

“Your 2015 Birthday Present wish – this might be an essential Diabetes Sick Day management tool someday”

It’s a Robot Nurse, if the EU founded project is successful, “Nursebot” prototypes will be making their appearance in hospitals by 2010. Working in “swarms” which communicate with each other using either a wireless Local Area Network or Bluetooth, each robot will carry sensors and equipments for different jobs and assign themselves to relevant tasks. For example - Robots with thermal imaging camera could observe patients maybe during the night when there is limited nursing staff available. Project leader Thomas Sclegel of the Fraunhofer Institute in Germany, said -->


“The idea is not only to have mobile robots but also a full system of integrated information terminals so the hospital is full of interaction and intelligence”

Imagine that! It is called the IWARD project.

IWARD Stands for “intelligent Robot Swarm for Attendance, Recognition, Cleaning and Delivery” it targets mainly hospitals and healthcare centres to overcome the shortages of healthcare staff – a major issue in European healthcare. Our aging society and economic pressure increase the patients-to-medics’ ratio, having an adverse effect on healthcare quality and performance. Not being able to attend all patients at the right time and not keeping the hospitals clean enough (e.g. MRSA Transmission) also increases recovery time and cost.